The Most Important Thing You Can Do While You’re Single – The Relationship Matrix

My Personal Relationship Matrix

Once you are “in” a relationship, it is hard to objectively judge that relationship. Because it is so easy to confuse attraction for quality partnership, you need a set of guidelines to judge potential long-term partners against. This is best done while you are SINGLE and aren’t writing the list in a reaction to one particular person but as a summary of your needs from multiple relationships.

Get a big piece of paper or start a spreadsheet and create columns for the following:

Hard Limits or Non-Negotiables: These are the thoughts, behaviors, and experiences that you will not tolerate in a relationship. Any of these would be a reason to break up.

Feelings: How do you want to feel about your partner and what feelings do you hope they have in return?

Behaviors: What are general things you should do for each other? How should you act around each other? What will you do in an average week with each other?

Frequent Experiences: What are the gestures, activities and experiences you want to share with your partner several times a year.

Lifetime Experiences: What are the life goals you should share? What do you want to happen in you relationship in the long term?

Now is the hard part, take some serious time to think through these. Don’t worry, this will be a living document so you won’t get everything the first time. Things will change over time as you meet new people.

Done? Phew. That was hard! Now just because you have this matrix doesn’t mean you should try and judge every date before you meet them against these criteria. Meet a LOT of new people and you’ll see how each compares as the matrix evolves. You’ll find some of the things you wrote down are not really necessary and there will be things you forgot too.